Personal and contextual factors predicting patients' reported quality of life: exploring congruency with Betty...

The search for factors which influence seriously ill people's quality of life continues to generate both interest and research. A retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted among 87 patients with lung cancer who ranged between the ages of 38 and 82 years. The purposes of this investigation were to determine whether relationships existed between patients' preferences for illness-related information, their satisfaction with family functioning, their level of learned resourcefulness and their reported quality of life. This paper focuses on the results of a stepwise multiple regression analysis which identified seven factors, namely, prognosis, surgery, current radiotherapy, performance status, self-control skills (learned resourcefulness), preference for information and age-group, which accounted for 30% of explained variance in patients' reported quality of life. No single factor contributed a substantial amount of the variance in this sample's reported quality of life. This observation suggests differences in people's perceptions of these factors and their importance to them. These results support a conclusion that people's evaluation of their quality of life is subjective, changeable and depends on the circumstances they face. Congruence between the assumptions underlying Neuman's health care system model, and the personal and contextual nature of these seven factors in patients' quality of life are explored. These findings are relevant for practice.